Thoughts about software development

These arrows are dead to me

Scrollbars are one of the most important inventions in computer user
interfaces. They have been there since day one of the "Windows Icon Menu
Pointer" paradigm, and interestingly, have hardly evolved since then. Here
is a very quick overview of the history of scrollbars:

Proportional scrollbars were a very important innovation that many
operating systems and UI toolkits took quite a while to implement them (Mac being
the first offender). When a scrollbar is not proportional, its "thumb"
never changes size, regardless of whether you are currently looking at 1% or
90% of a document. But history has judged and proportional scrollbars
are the norm now, even on cell phones. I believe the reason why Apple
and other vendors were reluctant offering proportional scrollbars was
because they were afraid the user would be confused. It was a
legitimate concern but Windows (and to some extent, Motif and other X Window
managers) quickly demonstrated that not only were users quite capable of
handling the visual information, they actually asked for it.

Another improvement that we saw through the years is to group the arrows
together. Very few user interfaces ventured there (AmigaOS was one of
the courageous ones), and yet, the idea is very appealing: why put the
up and down arrows so far from each other? They have a clear icon that
shows their purpose, so the additional information carried by their position
in the scrollbar doesn’t really add that much and forces the user to move
the mouse quite a bit and click on a very narrow button when they was to go
back and forth between two positions. Unfortunately, grouped arrows
never made it in the mainstream and I don’t know of any popular operating
system that features them. Quite sad.

Another very useful innovation that hasn’t received as much exposure as it
should is what I call "documented scrolling". It can be seen in a few
Office programs (the screenshot shows PowerPoint) and Acrobat Reader.
The idea is very simple: as you move the thumb after clicking on it
and keeping the button pressed, a small tooltip follows your move and lets
you know in what part of the document you will land if you release the
button. Very effective, yet marginal.

The reason for this post is my recent realization that I hardly click on the
arrows any more when I need to move through a lengthy document.

First of all, clicking on these small arrows has always been a challenge that
scores very poorly onFitt’s
law scale. Clicking on small areas of the screen is hard, especially
if your mouse needs to travel over a long distance to get there.

But what is mostly causing this phenomenon is the constant improvement in
pointing devices and techniques that have happened these past years, in order of
discovery:

Keyboard shortcuts. Very important, but hardly used by regular
users, and sometimes even abandoned by power users because they only work
well under certain focus conditions. If you have ever pressed "space",
expected the document to scroll down and realized that your cursor is in a
text field, you know what I mean.

The wheel. One of the best UI inventions of the past decade.
It is by far the most intuitive way to scroll a document and it is
universally cherished by power and regular users alike. There is
simply no way to misunderstand how the wheel works. Note however that
it does require certain focus conditions to be met as well, just like
keyboard shortcuts, but the good news is that you can fix this problem by
using the same device you are trying to operate (as opposed to keyboard
shortcuts, which might force you to leave the keyboard, move the mouse,
click somewhere and then move your hands back to the keyboard).

The trackpad, which is very efficiently standing in for mouse scrolling
on laptops. The trackpad in itself doesn’t really help you scroll
through a document, but a few innovative ideas have been implemented
recently by manufacturers that make scrolling with them a breeze, albeit to
the price of some extra complexity. I know of two such methods:

Side scrolling. Put your finger on the right hand side of the
trackpad, keep it pressed and move your finger up or down. This
method is very effective and traditionally found on Thinkpads.

Double finger touch. Touch your trackpad with two fingers
simultaneously, keep them in contact with the surface and move them up
or down. This method is a bit more intuitive than the one above
because you can touch any part of the trackpad to enable it.

With all this in mind, it’s hard for me to come up with a reason to click on
any of these tiny arrows any more, and yet, I see a lot of people do this on a
regular basis. The arrows are definitely not going away, so maybe software
vendors should come up with way to make them a bit more friendly, such as maybe
magnifying them as the pointer comes in their vicinity?

How about you, how do you scroll through long documents?

This entry was posted on March 29, 2006, 8:07 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0.
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16 Comments

I imagine you will soon be deluged by Mac users letting you know that OSX supports the grouped arrow icons on a scrollbar. You can even pick which way you want them to appear, grouped or ungrouped. I don’t have a Mac in front of me now, but I believe the default was to group them.

I almost always click and drag the actual scroll bar itself when I scroll through a document. Also, clicking the mousewheel in many programs/os allows you to use the mouse to scroll up and down through the document.

I do use the arrows, especially with s glidepad on the notbook for scrolling line/item-by-line/item through a list (for example the list of rss feeds). Because the click button is less sensitive to uncontroled movement this is a good feedback to “acknowledge” that one has seen a line.
On the Desktop i prefer wheel of keys.

To me the mouse is dead!
Only reason for me to use the mouse if when I’m doing some serious DTP (Quark XPress running on an old pre-OS X Mac G3). For all the rest there’s the keyboard. Fear that developer looking over your shoulder and saying “your IDE is nice, but it looks like you need to use the mouse”.
Seriously, shortcuts when they’re available (“one screen up”, “one screen down”, “center on cursor”, these kind of things). A little Emacs plugin does wonder to most IDEs in this respect. And the scrollwheel (on a 2 buttons + scrollwheel Logitech mouse) when the app doesn’t support convenient shortcuts.
That said I do think that for anything non-graphical the mouse is an anti-pattern and it’s a sad fact that so many non-graphical app rely on it.
I use “virtual desktops” (seven of them) with usually one app opened in “full screen” per virtual desktop and when there’s more than one app (eg terminals) I use alt-tab to switch between them (and then I use the application’s shortcut to do stuff or the mouse if it the only way).

I am clearly a power user since I almost exclusively use the scroll wheel to move up and down documents alongside the PageUP and PageDown keys. Prior to the scroll wheel,I used to click in the grey area of the scrollbar to move a screen at a time.
I would argue that the majority of users would not even think of doing any of these things. They have been trained to use the up/down scroll buttons on the scroll bar.
If I could have 10 dollars for every time I have looked over a friend or colleagues shoulder and see them clicking those up/down icons, I would be a very rich man indeed.
If I had another 10 bucks for every time I saw some one trying to ‘rapidly’ scroll through a document by repeatedly clicking those icons, I would be an even richer man.
Somehow, all those UI innovations have been lost on those whose daily use of a computer is as a tool. All those little innovations that you and I appreciate (the scroll wheel, the keyboard accelerators) are, to a great extent, wasted on the vast majority of our users.
I find it amazing that the vast unwashed [out there] do not see the value in learning that ‘cut’ is ctrl-x, ‘copy’ is ctrl-c and ‘paste’ is ctrl-x. Yet they spend their days making their mouse travel kilometers up and down to the toolbar.
I appreciate all these little innovations but they are lost on the greater community of computer users. It would appear that the more eye candy we create the more it gets used and the lower our productivity gets.
Can anyone argue that UI changes in the last 5 years have made the wider community of computer users ‘more’ productive?
I doubt it.
So, having the arrow icons together is a great idea, but almost everyone will get annoyed at the change since it isn’t ‘standard’. They just won’t get it.
Such is the human condition.

Can I point out a useful alternative to grouping scrollbar buttons together. RISC OS uses the right mouse button to reverse the direction of travel of the scrollbar when you click on an arrow. This could be integrated into Windows with no side effects – infact at least one company (Xara) does this with their product (Xara Xtreme).
Oh – and RISC OS had proportional scrollbars in 1991

Can I point out a useful alternative to grouping scrollbar buttons together. RISC OS uses the right mouse button to reverse the direction of travel of the scrollbar when you click on an arrow. This could be integrated into Windows with no side effects – infact at least one company (Xara) does this with their product (Xara Xtreme).
Oh – and RISC OS had proportional scrollbars in 1991

I’ve used the two finger scroll on my PowerBook trackpad for the past year, and now I can’t stand to use a standard keyboard anymore. I read a lot, so I scroll a lot – and the two finger scroll is just natural. It scrolls horizontally too. This is a market opportunity – keyboards with built in natural scroll devices. They must exist….

Talking about UI (ok this is really unrelated).
The fact that there is no confirmation when you post a comment here, and you don’t see your comment added makes us stupid readers post the same comment several times